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Opinion: Why Training for Weight Loss is a Waste of Time We all know that exercise burns calories and revving up your internal combustion engine is key to weight loss. Yet we’re all wrong, says Dr Herman Pontzer. Could our efforts to train ourselves trimmer be a fat lot of good? The Hadza hunter-gatherer tribe in east Africa averages more physical activity in a day than typical westerners do in a week – but they don’t burn any more calories. That’s because, as Dr Herman Pontzer explains in his book   Burn: The Misunderstood Science Of Metabolism  (Allen Lane), ‘the armchair mechanic’s view’ of your body as a simple machine isn’t how it actually works. Your body is a dynamic organism evolved to match energy expenditure to fluctuating food intake, manipulating your metabolism accordingly. After all, burning more calories than you eat forces your body to consume itself, eventually to death. If anything, says Dr Pontzer, your body is like a business with a fixed energy budget: exe...